What upset everybody so much? It may be that she seems so unaffected herself. She stares placidly at the viewer, putting us in the uneasy role of client to an alluring, if bored-looking, whore. Manet inhabited a world in which it was generally assumed that a woman existed to nurture, comfort, inspire or arouse, all in relation to her place in society and family. But Olympia, for all her blatant accessibility, is tantalizingly self-sufficient. There's nothing supplicating or humble about her. To the wealthy collectors of art and women, who regarded both as possessions, Olympia stripped them of their illusions. Her body is ripe for the taking, but everything else, including the meaning behind that enigmatic almost-smile, she's keeping for herself.

For all the great paintings in the history of art, few show a woman whose gaze is so startlingly direct and defiantly unaccommodating. Mona Lisa shyly glances to her left. So does Vermeer's "Girl with a Pearl Earring." Botticelli's Venus looks out dreamily into the middle distance, lost in her own thoughts, while Sargent's Madame X turns her head away completely. And scores of Virgin Marys glance rapturously up at the angels or tenderly down at their babes.

When a woman does face front in a painting, it's likely to be a portrait of a queen, not a canvas of a concubine. Olympia meets us eye to eye. It's an ingenious and unsettling device, a bit of artist's revenge. The image in the frame is the one doing the sizing up, and it is we who are left feeling appraised -- and potentially rejected. The critics, unaccustomed to having the tables so turned on them, were quick to serve up rejections of their own. They hated the subject matter. They hated the flat, primitive style. They hated everything about it.

"What's this yellow-bellied Odalisque, this vile model picked up who knows where, and who represents Olympia?" demanded one writer. "Inconceivable vulgarity," declared another, while yet another proclaimed that "art sunk so low does not even deserve reproach."

Manet was devastated. "The insults rain down on me like hail," he complained to his friend, the poet Baudelaire. Yet while many looked upon Olympia as a symbol of depravity or a slattern, others recognized her as a triumph. The writer Émile Zola called it Manet's "masterpiece," declaring, "It will endure as the characteristic expression of his talent, as the highest mark of his power ... When other artists correct nature by painting Venus they lie. Manet asked himself why he should lie. Why not tell the truth?" But the truth came at a cost.

Though he continued to paint and exhibit for the rest of his life, Manet remained a frequent target of public disdain, forever misunderstood and tainted by the scandals of his youth. He hadn't sought to offend; he simply painted the best way he knew how, in bold strokes and unexpected contrasts. And he wasn't alone -- his innovative techniques and unconventionally ordinary choices of subject matter eventually ignited a new generation of artists. Though he refused to label himself as such, his successors hailed him as the father of impressionism. He was among the vanguard to glorify not the figures of myth, but the radiance of absinthe drinkers, suicides and prostitutes.

In the artist's lifetime Olympia never received her due, but she aged remarkably well. Years after Manet's death, Claude Monet offered the work to the French government, and it's been a Parisian museum fixture ever since. Manet would have been pleased. He knew that to appreciate her, we just needed to look a little longer. "Time itself imperceptibly works on paintings," he said, "and softens the original harshness." The shock she provides now is one not of outrage but of awe.

One need only bask in the heady loveliness of Olympia, the shadows between her fingers, the curve of her belly, the contrasts of light and dark, to understand the depth of Manet's talent. But when we look deeper -- at the complexities and contradictions and beauty and brutality of his work -- his true genius emerges. Art to Manet wasn't a story about gods or saints or kings. It was about real life, as ordinary as commerce, as easy as sex.

To worship a goddess is easy, but to love a human -- especially one who offers no hint of reciprocation -- is far more work, and infinitely more thrilling. Manet brought the hidden world of the everyday into the light and made it remarkable. For all that's reserved about Olympia's demeanor, the passion of her creator is there in every stroke and every line. She may withhold her heart, but we, helpless, are under her spell forever.

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